I think it was in "New York" Magazine that a writer coined the phrase "Sudoku" movies to describe this film and last year's even worse and even more awarded "Crash." You take a bunch of story lines, throw them in a blender, have people run into other people in meaningful ways that are meaningless and >pow< the world has a theme. "Crash" took place in an imaginary world where all anyone ever thinks about is race and stealing titles from superior David Cronenberg movies. "Babel" cannot even boast that connecting theme, it is just a movie about people doing really stupid things. Hey, let's drive home drunk across the US Border in the middle of the night with two white kids. Let's run from five-o, that'll work out. Hey, let's try firing live ammunition at buses. Then there are the wonderful "that would never happen" things, like Rinko Kikuchi's character, such a stunner that we are invited to ogle her time and time again, but those mean Japanese boys won't sleep with her. Right. I can't decide, was it racist or ethnicist to have the little Arab boy spying on his naked sister? Oh, and the entire thing falls on its face because A) the maid can't come up with a SINGLE place to put the kids, doesn't the couple have ANY friends? and B) she doesn't own a cellphone. "Cancel your son's wedding." Right. Funny that out of the big three Mexican directed films, this is easily the worst and easily the most recognized. Watching the three of them together and watching Inarritu condescend to Cuaron and del Toro, his vast superiors, and now the argument with Arriaga over who came up with this junk to begin with. Just sad. And what a boring boring boring overlong over-important windbag of a movie. The sort of thing that makes you reassess his previous films and wonder if there wasn't much there to begin with.
Review of Babel
